


Blame It on the Goose

by slayertown



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV), Untitled Goose Game (Video Game)
Genre: 8x05 divergent, Alternate Universe - The Soulmate Goose of Enforcement, F/M, Gendrya - Freeform, Goose-typical violence, Humor, Soulmates, geus ex machina, untitled goose game crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-24 18:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21103787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slayertown/pseuds/slayertown
Summary: "And I looked, and behold a pale goose: and the name that sat on them was Death, and Hell followed with them."Soulmates AU where one person finds a goose that leads them to the other. Only this time the goose is from a certain video game village. Prompt originally from user @Boxstorm.🔔 🦢💞





	Blame It on the Goose

Flames are a woman’s glory. The legend of ten thousand ships said so. Ten thousand ships were once set ablaze in defiance, and their smoke wafted through the ages to plant warrior-shaped dreams in the mind of a young girl.

But she got the taste of it wrong. The taste of fire is not splendor, but bitter choking—talons made of ground bodies and buildings that scratch the insides of her breath, her breath that is now so full of effort and bile.

Arya wanted to lead the survivors out like Nymeria led the Rhoynar. But she couldn’t. The hero of Winterfell did no heroing today, championed no one, and salvaged nothing.

Now all that’s left to rescue is herself.

She scans the landscape of flames and rubble and emptiness. Through the hazy distance, she catches something clean and moving. Something living. Unscathed by the wreckage stands an unlikely harbinger of hope, a vision in white.

It’s a goose.

Step by step, she brings herself to it. It bows its head for her, and Arya slowly reaches out her hand.

“_Shhhhhh…_”

Arya feels the smooth feathers along the back of its head. The creature is calm for being surrounded by charred and smoking ruins. She can at least help this one out, she hopes. But the neck twists around her wrist and the beak clamps down onto her fingers.

“Ow!”

_HONK. HONK._

“Cunt!” _Sorry. Reflex._

The goose starts waddling back towards the archway Arya just left through, the one she cheated death half a hundred times before she could pass.

“No, don’t go in there!”

It stops at a pile of on-fire debris and pecks at the base of blasted stone and lime. On instinct Arya goes after it. It is very clear this thing can not take care of itself.

When its head emerges from the pile, the sound of ringing pierces the air again.

In its beak, the goose holds a small, golden bell, clinging and clanging incessantly as its ropey neck wags left and right in Arya’s face. The bell, the instrument that played the song of the city’s devastation. The bell, the charm of conquest braided into the hairs of the city’s takers. It is not a welcome sound.

The goose is stupid, but Arya has saved stupider. She kneels to pick it up from its clamorous fit, but the animal reacts quickly and drops the bell to avoid her.

She watches the feathered, pointy butt waggle to where the bodies lay in a grave hug.

And then she watches it pluck from the tiny clutches of the innocent dead one ashen, wooden horse.

“NO!”

_Plat plat, plat plat_, goes the webbed feet of the worm-necked animal.

Quick as a snake, Arya tackles the goose. But its pillow-plump body slips through her arms like a river trout, the horse dropping out of its orange maw. Quickly, Arya grabs it and wipes what goose spit she can with her dirtied glove. It’s a small, solemn grace to return the toy to the body of the young girl she could not save.

_HONK HONK._

Arya turns around to see the goose squawking directly at her. Without question, it is annoying. But it could have some injury that she can’t see, because it still hasn’t taken flight and it's meandering in a war zone.

She attempts another approach, slowly, to get a closer look. It's just her luck that every time she is in King’s Landing she has to chase a bird.

Then it comes at her like an arrow through the wind. The goose glides up at her face, flapping its slappy, wide wings. She swats at it with frantic palms, tempted to draw her weapon, but hesitant to add more violence to the already irreparable toll.

Then she feels a wetness on her forehead, a phlegmy ooze crawling down her temple. 

The bird shat on her.

She uses her glove to check, and now there is bird shit on her head, her hand, and her skirt where she wipes off the sample.

_HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK._

It taunts her now from a distance. With its back to the outskirts of the city, the goose stands down the path, facing Arya in contempt.

The beady-eyed bird looks into that of a warbred direwolf and spits its mockery with one mindless squall.

_HONK._

Arya Stark understands killers; mystic assassins, ice demons, and shitty men—everything in that realm is a library book, shut and dusted. But something about this bird, this calculating envoy of mischief, challenges her.

Well, she’s had enough of winged creatures and their destruction.

_HONK HONK._

Arya charges. Head wound and head shit and body aches be damned. She charges with the last of what she’s got.She will chase the bird that is mayhem born from mayhem until it nests in hell.

Flapping its turnipy mass low to the ground, the goose flies its way to the army camps, Arya tailing it the entire time.

At the camp, the Northmen are bringing in survivors. Calls for help compete across the air as too few healers scramble to heed them. The stench is somehow worse than what it was in the city itself.

One soldier shoulders along a badly burned man. His right arm and torso are crackled and blistered, the skin boiled into craters of pus and pain. Arya can’t help but see a seven year old boy in his place.

Struggling to walk, the man stumbles onto his knees. At once, Arya tries to help lift him up from the waist. But the contact makes him wail and she jerks away on instinct, landing on her rear for a moment before she feels a tug against her right hip.

Every time she sinks into the red urgency of ashes and bodies around her, this white windbag yanks her into calamity.

Needle is gone. And the horrible goose in its horrible goose rampage is dragging Needle away with its cursed honkhole.

The soldier sees the injured man off, and Arya dives for her sword. The no-fingers having bird relinquishes it easy enough and resumes its languid, dolted waddling.

Now it’s _very_ personal, _deeply_ personal, _top of the list_ personal. The survivors could use something to eat and what better than a wingbitch from the seventh hell. It is as they say:

No harm, no fowl.

Arya chases the goose up and around the paths, weaving through the chaos of a fledgling relief effort. That it hasn’t once taken to the skies to find some crap-watered lake is how she knows this goose has made her a target. Well, she it, too.

The stubby, pink legs flail outward repeatedly like clumsy oars on a boat until it stops and honks purposefully at the entrance of a yellow tent. How the bird chooses when to observe fourthway decent etiquette is beyond sense.

_HONK HONK HONK._

Amidst the standoff between wolven rage and plumed terror-making emerges one Gendry Baratheon.

“What in seven hundred fucks is—“ He’s covered in cuts and scratches, gray and grime, and his face falls.

“Arya.”

The honking stops.

Mindlessly, Needle returns to her side. In all of the wretched noise and petty disaster, she forgot how good it could be to see him, that there could even be anything so good.

Exhaustion lets the tears down her cheek and firm hands lead her into the tent.

Gendry hastily sits her on the cot and wets a cloth to her face. Finally, she does not have to move and she lets herself be tended to, lets herself surrender to his care.

“How’s there shit on you?” Gendry can't pick a thing to be more distressed about, but he manages to wipe off the excrement and apply pressure to the gash on her scalp, his large hand managing to cover the whole of the wound with a thick rag.

The presence of her old friend, her old lover, brings her short-lived relief. Now that her body has come to a stop, she can feel how little is really left of her; all else driven empty by dragonfire and goosecry. The fatigue settles into her bones like dry rot and a heaviness fills her limbs. The tent blackens like spilled ink and her weight tips into the voice kneeling in front of her.

“Arya, talk to me. I need you to keep your senses,” Gendry urges.

Lids lift enough to see a visage of fear in his features, his lips forming a lullaby of silence before the black swallows him again. She feels the cot dip next to her and strong arms case across her back and the front of her chest. If the Stranger could show her any kindness, let it be his embrace.

“I didn’t lose you just to… _lose_ you, damnit,” she does not hear him say.

Instead she hears the wind of the weirwoods. A chorus of voices rustle through the years. _The lone wolf dies._ Not today. _The strongest person I know._ Blue eyes. _Go home, girl._ Have you seen my wife? _You’re beautiful and I love you and._ Honk.

“Be with me,” she says through the darkness.

After taking back her name and taking back her home, happy was the lesson Arya relearned in the Winterfell forges, one she endeared herself to with every mounting visit, with every selfish interruption. Inklings of the lesson fill her skin now where resistance once burrowed itself deep to the bone. Long before she knew it, Gendry became more than a familiar face.

He's a rabbit leg in starvation, he's laughter in the cold, he's bare skin on the eve of the end. He proves himself in this way every time, and here, once again, he is her survival against the odds.

Arid lips share a soft kiss, the way old friends do, the way old lovers do, and with the gentleness of a breeze, Arya Stark is guided back to the world. Through blood and shit and war, it seems something beyond her always guides Arya back to her unfinished heart.

Quiet at last, the goose huddles in the corner. It might be a goose that likes rain.

* * *

Elsewhere in the North, the fog clears in Bran Stark’s eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> [Bonus art here!](https://66.media.tumblr.com/1b2dac132d95b935fce4e743c2100fcb/26b05046d186b5a5-8e/s1280x1920/a5a4e4fb680d7b2362595c9ad5734a356feb1038.png)
> 
> Title from the goddess called Lizzo and also [this trailer](https://twitter.com/ohjefframos/status/1176855252349390848).  
Largely inspired by [this manifesto](https://www.shatnerchatner.com/p/i-am-the-horrible-goose-that-lives%22).
> 
> @harrenhollaback on tumblr if you wanna leave a honk


End file.
